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It looks like XFS is still fastest...

It looks like XFS is still the fastest for the majority of test but brtfs is a very close second. I'm not at all surprised. I've been a fan of XFS since I supported SGI servers and workstations way back when. XFS is one piece of SGI's legacy that survives, and deservedly so. I just wish it had all the Linux tools that exist for ext3/4.

I thought it odd that he mounted ext3 with the performance boosting "noatime" option but did not also mount reiserfs with that same option - which, along with the "notail" reiserfs mount option, is clearly explained in the linux mount manpage and would have greatly increased performance. Although I'm using ext4 these days, back when i was using reiser, all of the benchmarks I could find and run showed reiser to be significantly faster than ext3.

BTW I found the most recent phoronix filesystem benchmarks of interest - they also showed xfs as being the fastest in most tests.

@gus - I must have missed the fine print. When I was reading what he said about reiser, I thought he said something like "I couldn't find any documentation on reiserfs mount options so I didn't use any" - my bad if I misunderstood.

I have to admit XFS is pretty impressive - especially if you compare it to other file systems from corporate origins. At one time I thought IBM's JFS looked pretty promising, but now that the dust has settled it's clearly no world beater. IIUC IBM started the linux port of JFS not with the AIX filesystem code, but with the OS/2 code (the less advanced code as I understand it), ported it to linux, debugged it, and it's basically been coasting since then. On the other hand, SGI's generous gift to linux, XFS, has received not only maintenance but steady enhancements over time. It's good to see a corporate contribution that actually shines.

I tested "notail", adding it to "noatime,nodiratime" and also a round with "sync" added.

With 5 threads, "notail" (but no "sync") had about a 3% performance impact on two individual runs, one dropping, one improving (average: no appreciable difference). With 20 threads, all numbers dropped at least 5%.

My testing during the 2003-2006 era showed reiserfs soundly trouncing ext3, jfs and xfs in every benchmark I could come up with. I suppose it goes without saying that things change over time, especially in the IT world.

I purposely omitted ReiserFS in my earlier stuff, because of the tendency to route around the Linux VFS infrastructure. But if I'm going to include the experimental btrfs, I should also include ReiserFS, to be fair.

Incidentally, going with sync mounts made Ext4 a much stronger contender than XFS.

Some stats: 119k files in portage, of which 71k smaller than 1024 bytes. I'm not sure what the limit is for tail packaging. Probably not very interesting anyway, unless you're copying these kind of files whole day, and I think your research shows ReiserFS doesn't offer good performance anyway.

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